I’m taking a short break from my musings on relationships to cover something near and dear to my heart. That’s right! Capitalism and a few nuggets to catch everyone up with my life.

Wants and Needs

Ok, first things first, currently Angela and I are on track to do a lot of acquisitions within the next two years. This is the tentative short list:

• Nissan GT-R or other comparable higher end sports car. Still in the running is the Porsche and maybe a Jaguar. I still have a gripe about Jaguar releasing shitty low end cars for the average consumer.
• Possibly a new house. Since we bailed on NC, we’re looking at houses here. I have my eye on three possibilities. One of them is two houses down from our really hot friend, Amy. I would LOVE to live next to her. She is absolutely one of the nicest and sweetest women that I know. Oh, yeah. And gorgeous. And she loves dogs. And she talks to me like she’s one of the guys.
• Possibly a condo downtown. With the amount of socializing that I do downtown it is almost natural that we would own property there. Monday night I’m meeting my friend Sam and his brother to discuss what they have in the works. (More on Sam and his brother later in this post)
• Vacation, bot together and separately with other people. We’ve got a lot going on in the next few months and neither one of us can wait! First on our agenda is a trip via the Acela north through Boston. We might bring Angela’s pet, Dylan, along so that he could romp around MIT and see if that’s a school that he would like to attend when he graduates. After that, we send him home and then we travel further north to NY, possibly to hang out with Shalini in Manhattan. I love Shalini to pieces. I recently got to see her at a party and it is hard to believe that I knew her since she was a 17 year old kid about to go to college. Now she’s 27 and as beautiful as ever. After that, Angela and I have various trips planned between us from October to March. Which will eventually bring us to our anniversary/birthdays in April and May. I might have a surprise for Angela by then!
• More hardware for our home office. With the office recarpeted, repainted and the new furniture in we’ll start to do an equipment refresh. On the agenda? Convert Angela’s old machine into something else, possibly a Myth box for the office or some other dedicated media server. We would then replace her machine with a PC and then drop in some higher end Macs.

Sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? Notice that I didn’t mention getting an iPhone? Yeah. You know why? I posted my confession on JSD’s NoneMoreWorthless site. I don’t want to hear about it. I like it. It is thin. And what are you going to do? Rag on us for essentially spending $2k on cell phones in less than a year (2 iPhones, 2 HTC 8525s)? Boo-hoo. What do we care? We’re DINKS.

Tidbits.

• The other week I went out with Allie right after work. I thought I’d get home at a reasonable hour, like 11 or 12. I thought that we were going to meet Sam at his brother’s new restaurant, Axis Bar & Grill at 1340 U Street, NW. We got there about 7 or so and had drinks. Sam had to bail on us because he had unexpected company at his house. His brother, on the other hand, came by and pretty much hung out with us for the entire night. It was hilarious. We had a great time there. The food was great, the drinks were good and the company was fabulous. Allie and I separated for about an hour around 1am so she could visit a friend’s uncle’s bar. When we finally got back together at 2am I walked her home. I finally dragged myself into my front door at about 4am, exhausted. And that’s when Angela and I got up early to get office furniture…
• Angela did a magnificent job with the office. I’m amazed at how well it turned out. You know, she does have a tendency to do Lucille Ball type adventures so I was half expecting a wrecking ball to come crashing through while we were working. On the contrary, with the exception of a few missing pieces of furniture, it all seems to have worked pretty smoothly. We have a lot to do, though, with our networking throughout the house. That includes the telephony. Should we eventually get FIOS into our shack, I’m tempted to try running an Asterisk system within our house.
• I had a huge happy hour a Cieba not too long ago. That was met with a lot of good reviews from my team who got to see the more saucy Michael. Last week I held a smaller happy hour which started at 3pm. Ouch. I tried to moderate my drunkenness since I was going to have dinner & drinks with the lovely Sidney later. Next up? I’ve organized a pretty big happy hour at Lucky Strike in China Town. The nice thing about this is that it is right near Clydes. If I’m lucky, they’ll want to traipse around with me to Fado’s where I can meet up with my old mates. Oh, I loves me my Irish pub. I hear they still ask about me there.
• Sidney really does have a nice rack. So much so that I decided it deserved its own bullet point. I really, really enjoy spending time with beautiful women.
• Angela thinks I have a sickness. I admit I’m a clothes horse. But a sickness? Pitchit keeps accusing me of being a metrosexual. I really didn’t mind it until one of my coworkers joked that I was a foppish dandy. FOPPISH DANDY?! Yeah, I can live with that. I swear, one day I’ll sit at my desk with my fuzzy slippers on and a smoking jacket and ascot. Did I mention pants anywhere in that sentence? No. No, I did not.
• Tea with the ladies this Thursday. Ok, not actually tea. The Willard has an afternoon tea service but in July it is only on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. So the ladies decided they would still like to have tea. Except at the bar at the Willard.  It has now turned to a cocktail party. Oy. The last time something like this happened to me there I wound up having a short conversation with Madelein Albright. I LOVE working in Washington, DC. Especially since I’m near the White House, the Ronald Reagan building, the Willard, Hotel Washington and the Department of Treasury.
• Mom is still having a hard time with my Dad’s death. I suppose we all are. Right now she’s doing a lot of travelling between Northern Virginia and Virginia Beach. I think she just wants some place she’s comfortable with and that she can call home. I picked her up from Virginia Beach today and brought her back to NoVa. I’ll be bringing her back down next weekend. We’re going to spend that time together looking for a little dog for her.

Ok, enough for now. I have to finish some work that’s on my plate.  After I finish two small projects I’ll be able to start on my freelance work for Gary in Germany and George in Sacramento.  I’ve been pretty screwed with time lately. I normally only have time to work on freelance and side projects between 2 and 5am.